“Is this some kind of protest?” said Diane. “Have I been working you too hard?”
“We came to see the skull,” said David.
“OK.” Diane picked up the crystal skull and handed it to David.
“Wow,” he said. “This is nice.” He turned the skull over in his hand and caressed the surface. “Is it ancient?”
“No way to tell,” said Diane. “All quartz is ancient, so there’s no help there. And there’s no way to effectively analyze the tool marks. They could have been made a thousand years ago or yesterday using tools of ancient design. That’s part of the mystery of crystal skulls.”
“This is just about the neatest thing,” said David. He handed it to Neva.
“It’d be pretty with a light shining through from the bottom,” she said. “Pretty mysterious, too.”
“Yes, it would,” agreed Diane. “Did you guys come just to look at the crystal skull, or was there some other reason?”
Neva handed the skull off to Jin. He turned it over and looked at it from all sides. Then he held it up to the light and looked deep into it.
“We’re just stuck, Boss,” he said when he finished looking through the skull. “We thought if we sat in the skull’s aura…”
“We thought no such thing,” said Neva. “We just thought getting our mind off the cases for a while, some idea might surface.”
“I’ve had the same problem,” said Diane. “I was just about to call Garnett when you came.”
She lifted the phone and dialed his number.
“Garnett,” he answered.
“It’s Diane. Do you have anything you can share with us? What’s going on with the Stanton and McNair cases?”
“I can tell you this. The meth lab evidence didn’t make it to the arson lab and I don’t know where it is.”
“What? Did McNair steal it? How was he expecting to get away with that?”
“Maybe he’d say his truck was stolen. I suppose his plan was to say someone came into the dock at the arson lab and took it.”
“He left it in the truck? Why wasn’t it transferred?” asked Diane. Her three criminalists stared at her.
“The evidence is gone?” mouthed David.
Diane nodded.
“I don’t know,” said Garnett, “but the meth lab explosion is pretty much at a standstill, and guess who’s getting the heat?”
“I hope the commissioner,” said Diane.
“He is. I think he’s feeling betrayed at the moment,” said Garnett. “And we are taking some pretty heavy hits ourselves.”
“We have some information on Stanton that might be of use to you.”
“Oh? Tell me,” said Garnett.
“Why don’t you come over to the crime lab here? Perhaps we can share information.”
“Share?”
“I want to wrap the cases up as much as you do. I feel like Councilman Adler is going to have something to hold over me if I don’t. I realize that I’m not a credible suspect, but the guy deals in rumor and innuendo and not facts,” said Diane.
“I’ll be right there,” said Garnett.
“We’ll be waiting for you.” She hung up the phone. “OK, guys, maybe this will break something loose.”
Diane and her crime scene crew stayed busy in the lab catching up on work while they waited on Garnett for over an hour. Still no sign of him. Diane looked at her watch.
“I think we’ve been stood up,” she said.
As she pulled her cell phone out of her jacket pocket to call him, it vibrated in her hand. She looked at the display. Garnett.
“Traffic bad?” said Diane.
“They found Marcus McNair’s truck and the evidence-such as it is-in a warehouse off Nowhere Road. You and your team get up here.”
Chapter 34
The old redbrick warehouse looked like it was built when cotton was still king. It should surely be on the list of historic sites. She remembered it from when she was a kid as a place where no one-meaning kids-was supposed to go. Naturally that was a challenge, but attempts to investigate the building or use the place as a make-out spot were met with a series of ill-tempered night watchmen. It now stood like a derelict from another age, overgrown with weeds and invasive plants, the red bricks weathered and crumbling.
Diane parked the crime scene van beside one of the police cars and she and her crew piled out. They left their kits in the van and walked to the warehouse, entering through the large open doors. Pools of the fading sunlight shined through high broken-out windows, illuminating little. The flashlights carried by Garnett and the police were the only other effective source of light. The large truck Marcus used to haul away the evidence was parked in the middle of the room.
“What do we have here?” asked Diane, looking around at shadowy piles of twisted metal and rubble dumped on the ground.
“Jeez, what a mess,” said Jin. “Is this our evidence he hijacked?”
“Looks like it.” Garnett was all smiles. Diane would have thought he’d be thoroughly pissed at finding the meth lab evidence in such a state.
“Apparently McNair wanted to have a look at the evidence before he turned it in.” Garnett played his flashlight over a pile of bones. Diane winced at the blackened and broken fragments that had been cast aside.
“He was making sure we couldn’t identify the cook, wasn’t he,” said Diane. He was going to remove all the bones, repackage the other evidence, and then take it to his lab.”
“That’s what it looks like, but somebody shot him first,” said Garnett.
“Why are you so happy about this?” asked Diane.
“Because this warehouse and property belong to Councilman Adler. Oh look,” he said as another car drove up and parked outside the warehouse. “I think it’s the media. I wonder how they got wind of this?” He grinned and went out to meet them.
Diane and her crew looked at each other, eyebrows raised. “Payback’s a bitch,” said David. “Wow, did I use another word that starts with a
“OK,” said Diane. “David, you and Neva take the truck and warehouse. Jin, I want you to scout the whole area around the warehouse to make sure that there isn’t some ravine he’s been throwing bones in. I’ll have a look at this pile of bones over here. Do we have lights in the van?”
“Yes. I’ll hook them up,” said David.
Diane left the others to do their work and, going over to the pile of bones, squatted beside them to take a look. She pulled on a pair of gloves and picked up one of the bones-a fragment of skull. The bones, like the others in the greatest heat of the explosion, were badly burned. Some were almost white, others were blackened and cracked. However, there was one thing she saw immediately even in the dim light of the huge warehouse. In the pile of bones there were two left femora. There had been another person in the basement with the unknown victim whose skull she partially reconstructed.
Diane retrieved a flattened box from the van, put it together, and began packing the bones carefully inside. She was about to pack the last few bones when suddenly the section of warehouse was awash with light.
She stood and gave the scene another look. The entire floor was filled with piles and piles of rubble from the fire. He had brought all of the evidence here to go through himself before taking it to the arson lab to be processed. What was he looking for? Anything else beside the bones, or just anything that might incriminate him? Looking around at the compromised evidence, Diane had no doubt that McNair had been up to his eyeballs in
